The search service is currently offline

Woke up one day and I had the following error when accessing my MOSS Search Settings.

"The search service is currently offline. Visit the Services on Server page in Share Point Central Administration to verify whether the service is enabled. The might also be because an indexer move is in progress."

The error was popping up in two places.

1. Like I mentioned above when going into SSP then Search Settings
2. When going into User Profiles and Properties then View import log

I found a solution in the following link.

http://blog.sallarp.com/the-search-service-is-currently-offline/

The solution I used was in the first comment and not the blog post itself.

I had to open the command prompt, then navigate to Bin folder and last, I ran the following command.

psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait

It will bring down your site for a moment, I assume while restarting IIS, so you might want to run it off hours or notify your users that the site will be down for maintenance.

Sigh! crisis averted!